Basho
I suppose MadHaiku would not exist if it were not for the big kahuna of haiku himself, Matsuo Basho, a 17th century Japanese poet who ingeniously distilled several poetic forms into the simple three-line, 17-syllable structure that has come to represent the Zen of poetry. By all accounts Basho was a MadMonk of sorts, living simply in a hut and occasionally traversing the countryside, scattering his poems along the way like autumn leaves falling from a tree in the wind.
He was born Matsuo Kinsaku to a samurai family in 1644 near Osaka. According to legend, on a spring day in 1681, he planted a banana plant (basho), a gift from a devoted student, outside his modest hut in a rustic area of Edo, now known as Tokyo. The teacher greatly admired the plant, its large soft leaves that were easily torn away in gusts of wind, the small unobtrusive flowers, its long stalks that seemed to have no purpose. After awhile, his students came to call the place Basho Hut, and soon they were calling the teacher Master of the Basho Hut, or Master Basho. He liked the name and became Basho after that. One wonders what he might have named himself if the student had given him a gold fish instead. Somehow Sashimi (raw fish) just doesn't have that same ring.
Anyway, at night, alone in his hut, Basho would listen to the wind rustling the leaves of his beloved banana plant. When it rained, water would drip from the hut's leaky roof, inspiring this haiku:
Basho nowaki shite
Tarai ni ame o
Kiku yo kana(A banana plant in the autumn gale
I listen to the dripping of rain
Into a basin at night.)
Of his travels, he wrote books that bore titles like "The Records of a Weather-Exposed Skeleton" and "An Account of the Unreal Dwelling." He exhorted his disciples to choose the commonplace as the subjects of their poems. For example:
I woke up suddenly
With the ice of night
When the water-pot burst.
His most famous haiku is this:
Old pond
Frog jumps in
Splash!
A lot, of course, depends on the translation of Basho's work from the Japanese to English. Here's an example of the subtle differences of the above haiku according to three very different translators:
The old pond
A frog jumps in
The sound of water.Old pond
leap - splash
a frog.Old dark sleepy pond
quick unexpected frog
goes plop! Watersplash.
Basho's work must seem quite quaint to the ears of modernity. Nowadays poets and laymen alike use haiku for social commentary or to address all manner of grievances. There are more than 500 haiku titles at amazon.com, according to a magazine article sent by a friend. I even accidentally came across a whole series of haiku on a telephone company's web site about dialing your cell phone with your thumb.
Basho, who died in 1694, would be amused, I think.
Mad monk in your hut
Thinking of the rain at night
What has basho wrought?